The Chicago Trading Pits are a reminder that finance was once a very physical industry. Brokers, who would buy and sell billions of dollars of financial contracts each day needed to be fluent in the pits’ complicated vocabulary of hand signals to indicate what they wanted to buy and at what price.
Yet those that knew how to read the room were often the slowest to react to what was going on outside it. As the new millennium rolled around finance was changing. Firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had started investing heavily in computers that would give them access to new digital markets, as finance began to migrate online.
Today, finance is on the move once again. New cloud technology is helping financial organisations leverage vast amounts of data on everything from transactions to resource availability to build powerful applications for their customers. By the end of 2024, 50% of financial services firms surveyed by FIS were leveraging data stored on the cloud to run chatbots, personalised user interfaces, marketing, and customer segmentation tools.
By 2031, the cloud computing market is expected to be worth around $2.5 trillion, as more companies complete their digital transformations.1
The speed at which these companies are moving threatens to split the financial industry. Companies that have invested in vast physical data storage systems—now considered “legacy infrastructure”—are in danger of suffering a similar fate to those left in the pits. “Many firms continue to run multiple legacy systems on their premises,” says Steve Sabin, senior vice president of Lending at FIS. “Without a largely cloud-based technology stack it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to digitally transform at scale and provide the digital experiences and easier access to data that capital markets customers and platform users increasingly expect.”
Without a largely cloud-based technology stack it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to digitally transform at scale and provide the digital experiences and easier access to data that capital markets customers and platform users increasingly expect.
Steve Sabin, senior vice president of Lending at FIS
But how do you shift to a cloud infrastructure? The universe of technologies and vendors that companies need to select from can quickly lead to decision paralysis. Delays and Disruption can quickly cause costs to spiral out of control.
According to Mr Sabin, the companies that are successfully transitioning to a cloud architecture are following a clearly plotted roadmap built around quantifiable objectives: achieving a 50% reduction in trade settlement times within 12 months through automation, or increasing compliance speed by 40% after deploying advanced cloud security systems.
Integrating this roadmap into a longer-term financial strategy can square the initial expense with eventual savings on hardware upgrades and compliance costs. Software-as-a-service models make significantly easier by removing the upfront capital costs, as well as reducing unexpected expenses related to software updates, security patches, and hardware failures. Companies that are further along their digital transformation journey are already rolling out advanced cloud-based applications.
In January 2025, the British Hedge Fund Man Group announced that it had launched Arctic BD, an open-source tool which leverages advanced cloud infrastructure to analyse the entire global stock market in real time, helping analysts identify signals and find value in billions of rows and columns of data.2
The changing topography of capital markets
Just as computers created new global financial centres, Artificial Intelligence and cloud computing are remapping the financial world.
A raft of new subsidies and tax breaks launched by the Hong Kong government over the past two years has driven more than 60% of its business leaders to employ predictive analytics, more than the UK, US, and Australia, according to the 2024 FIS Global Innovation Research, a survey of 2,000 firms. Strict regulations threaten to stymie the nation’s progress however, and regions like Singapore—where just 39% of business leaders have adopted the same technology—are looking to make up ground and draw talent to the island nation. Multinational organizations in the US and Europe meanwhile, must tread a more careful line between innovation and compliance.
One European bank which attempted to migrate their operations onto the cloud recently found they needed approval from no less than 70 different jurisdictions.
The next decade will see more consolidation, and attempts to tighten data sovereignty laws further may force companies to choose between cloud and country. Those that act quickly will be able to leverage increasingly powerful technology to improve their service, manage risks, and unlock new opportunities in an increasingly digital marketplace.
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References
- 1.Allied Market Research, , 2025: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/cloud-services-market
- 2.